“What I think is just so deplorable about what Martin Kilson wrote is that he didn’t check the facts,” Kennedy added. “He has simply not done his homework. He could have called me.”

“He acts like what appears in the Boston Globe is the truth,” said Kennedy, referring to Kilson’s use of news reports to support his claims of Kennedy’s inaction.

In the past, other professors at Harvard have drawn criticism from Kilson.

In a letter that appeared in a 2000 edition of West Africa Review, Kilson referred to DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates’ film series Wonders of the African World as “intellectually atrocious.”

In that letter, Kilson also expressed disappointment in other members of the Faculty, specifically naming former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74, Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Tishman and Diker Professor of Sociology and of Afro-American Studies Lawrence D. Bobo and Boskey Professor of Law Lani Guinier ’71, among others, as members of “the younger age-cohort of progressive Black intellectuals at Harvard whom I thought would join” the scrutiny of Gates’ work.

Gates was unavailable for comment.

“Frankly, given what Professor Kilson has written about other of his colleagues, this is not surprising,” Kennedy said. “This isn’t the only time he’s gone off half-cocked casting aspersions on colleagues.”

The entirety of Kilson’s piece in The Black Commentator can be seen at http://www.blackcommentator.com/n_word.html.

—Staff writer Alexander J. Blenkinsopp can be reached at blenkins@fas.harvard.edu.